La Héronnière
La Héronnière
Alain Carle Architecte
LOCATION
Wentworth, Canada
TYPE
Residential › Private House
La Héronnière’s conceptual approach proposes an interpretation of the notion of recycling.
We offer a reflection on the importance of maintaining a theoretical issue in our practice, which seems undermined by the public’s sole interest today in the technical dimension: “sustainable development”.
La Héronnière was designed according to an approach related to upcycling (which consists of reclaiming waste into an object of value by the artist’s poetic intervention.
This current derives its origins, on the one hand, from the anti-establishment “attitudes” of Arte Povera, through Pop Art to the recent kitsch art of a Jeff Koons), recovering old conceptual references “recycled” into a new project vision, and on the other hand, by developing the project based on technical aspects related to recycling and renewable energy.
Four programmatic components define the framework of this exploration: Occupation, Supply, Reuse and Distinction, which obviously do not come from the “program” of the future occupants as such, but arise from the conceptual aspects of the project.
This is a recurring approach in our work, in which the questioning of form and place precedes the programmatic issues.
OCCUPATION
The program was common: a young family with two children wanted to build a house representing their values, their desire to occupy a natural setting harmoniously and “symbiotically”, with the site perceived as “the host”.
Environmental requirements were non-negotiable: no magnetic field in the inhabited space, no wireless communication protocol, energy self-sufficiency, materials free of volatile organic compounds, recovery of project residues, electric car, etc.
Faced with all these good intentions and technical requirements, characteristic of the values of Generation Y, we introduced just one more, which seemed to take precedence over these new media-promoter values:
The value of the place, the existential quality related to the environment. In contrast to the idea of performance quality, we promoted the conceptual and perceptual value of the architectural project, as a real counterpoint to the current concept of sustainable development.
The place of intervention, but especially the way its intrinsic structures were transformed, was therefore the meeting point of these two antagonistic visions of land use planning. The land presented a steep slope, a sort of diagonal plane, not conducive to residential appropriation
. In response to the spatial quality generated by this diagonal, we installed a horizontal plane in the landscape, generated from three mysteriously identical geodesic points, located at the top of three boulders present on the site (Fig. 2).
From that time on, the project was designed on a simple hierarchical principle of occupation: being above or below this horizon line... Below are living spaces with mineral ambiences and above are sleeping areas with lighter materials.
Below this horizontal plane, it was decided to reorganize the site in order to architecture a plateau that would become the outdoor living plane. The blasting residues were compacted and refused on the site to create the project’s new ground:
A disturbed surface rather than one extracted from the territory. A sort of “palliative treatment” of the violence done to the site during the act of excavation.
The subsequent stage positions the bearing walls of the horizontal plane linking the three existing rocks (Fig. 15). This plane is oversized relative to the residence’s perimeter to create outdoor areas protected from bad weather and from solar radiation in summer.
The concrete used for construction of the bearing walls is conjoined with the rocks, retaining a mineral quality on the lower level of the residence.
The walls are positioned perpendicular to the axis of deployment of the spaces, but especially relative to the path of the sun, in order to capture its energy during certain hours and store it to save on heating.
The ground is also concrete and plays the same role of passive component producing a heat and mass transfer at the end of the day.
